There is an embargo on exporting high-end Ai-optimized graphics adapters to China, so "building their own datacenter" to prevent releasing info isn't quite as easy as it sounds.

...A never-ending flock of drones departing a giant warehouse in the middle of nowhere seems VERY far off, but there is a far more practical way to use drones for delivery of small packages: instead of a warehouse, use a moving truck as their home base.

A delivery driver could simply slowly drive a truck with a modified roof through a neighborhood, automatically launching drones with packages whenever they get close to the delivery address. Drone drops package on the porch or backyard, flies back to the moving truck to pick up the next package to deliver when they get close. No need to get out of the van or even stop, which could greatly increase the # of deliveries per driver per hour, as well as reducing the necessary flight distance of the drone which cuts down its fuel needs and interception risk.

Easily user-replaceable batteries for cellphones is another item on the EU's list of requirements coming down the pipe, starting in 2027: https://mashable.com/article/r...

Smartphones must be "removable and replaceable by the end-user," meaning it must be easy to replace a battery without any kind of technical expertise. Manufacturers have until 2027 to adapt the design of their smartphones in order to comply with the EU law. The regulation applies to all batteries, including those in EVs and e-bikes, in the hopes of creating a "circular economy" where waste batteries can be recycled and reused to power electronics.

What are the odds that apple will be the very last manufacturer to comply with these rules, at the 11th hour?

1) "The government" didn't force USB-C down the industry's throat. The EU strongly suggested that the major tech companies get together and decide on a standard connector by themselves, "or else" they risked having one picked for them. Over several years later, it was the Amazons, Samsungs, Microsofts, Sony's, etc. of the world that all decided to standardize on USB-C. It wasn't until critical mass was reached and the vast majority of new mobile devices using USB-C that the EU mandated that everyone should use this as well.

2) If apple was truly convinced that the lightning standard is "so much better", then would have been literally NOTHING stopping them from releasing a phone with TWO ports side-by-side, one lightning and one USB-C. The requirement is that phones need to accept a standard USB-C charger, not that other ports are no longer allowed. Apple deciding to forego a dual port setup and switch to just USB-C on their flagship phone and tablet models clearly shows that it is perfectly adequate, fanboy belly-aching notwithstanding.

3) Laptops will be next. the EU has already stated that their goal is a standardized universal laptop charger as well. Almost every laptop charger today spits out the same 19.5V already, but there are a million different connector sizes at the end of the plug, plus a bunch of proprietary shenanigans blocking 3rd party chargers (Looking at you, Dell! Using a non-dell branded charger in a new precision laptop means the CPU throttles down to 10% of the normal speed, 350MHz instead of 3.5GHz, "for your protection"). The USB-C standard already allows up to 240W of power delivery, which is plenty for the overwhelming majority of laptops. If not, "the industry" still has some time left to pick a different (open) standard. If apple chooses to, they can nominate their own with the understanding that there won't be any gatekeeping.

Good thing that ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and mosasaurs are not dinosaurs, then.

HDDs already condensed down to just three manufacturers a decade ago: Seagate, western digital, and Toshiba. Other brands used for marketing are owned & operated under license, e.g. Hitachi HDDs are made & licensed by Westen Digital after they took over the Hitachi hdd manufacturing division. Iirc Seagate took over Samsung's hdd division.

Since any major overhaul of the voting system requires both parties to sign on, that is extremely unlikely to happen since it will undermine the duopoly they currently reap the benefits on. More democracy means less power to the current establishment.

Aside from the "a computer did it" aspect: Since modern AI's basically just regurgitate and recombine existing knowledge you could argue that every single thing that an AI spits out could be considered "obvious" and would therefore not be eligible to be patented on those grounds alone.

1) Even if an AI spits out a list of potential drug candidates, the company may list the person who actually fabricated the drug and verified that it worked as the inventor?

2) Even if the drug composition itself could not be patented, they can still patent their manufacturing/production method to produce the drug, and use that to keep the competition at bay.

This is the kind of system that would only make sense in limited use cases, e.g. for fleet cars: Like postal service delivery vans where a single company owns dozens or hundreds of like vehicles, where they could own & operate their own swap bays and own all the batteries in use. Delivery vans, taxi companies, shuttle bus services, that sort of thing.

For personal cars? unless the car in question did NOT charge for the initial battery in the first place, no one is going to want their brand new $10,000 battery swapped out for some random end-of-life fire hazard that has half the range of the brand new one.

OR... They just see the writing on the wall, write up and submit a patent with the sole purpose of cashing in and get a cut if someone else goes through the trouble of doing blockchain stuff.

Patents mean nothing regarding intent, tons of them are collected and gathering dust for no other reason than mutual-assured-destruction in case one of their competitors wants to prevent them from doing something blatantly obvious that everyone is doing which THEY were able to patent in the past -- "sure, technically we may be violating your patent, but YOU are violating a thousand of ours as well so why don't we all just forget about it"

It's not illegal to be a monopoly; it's illegal to abuse a monopoly status, or to leverage a monopoly in one field to gain a monopoly in another.

Microsoft being a convicted monopolist and repeatedly acting in bad faith in anti-competitive ways in the past heavily weighs against them when they are trying to consolidate and obtain a dominant position in other markets; this is a natural consequence of their own past transgressions.

There was no need to add something they already created of their own volition?

Pretty much every single commercial image editing suite since the late 90s / early 2000s will refuse to scan, import, or print accurate images of banknotes from ~60 different countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

...the mere fact that an AI "comes up" with something should pretty much by definition make it "obvious" and therefore not eligible to be patented.